Frugal Green Living: Shift Your Habit

Perhaps the reason I have become so negative about lists is that they are lazy, and often sloppy; they offer advice without having to explain why, for people who often don't want to take the time to learn. Books of lists are even sillier, the ultimate in lite reading, and I have a small pile of them that I won't be reviewing.

That is why I opened Elizabeth Rogers' new book Shift Your Habit with some trepidation. I did like the first line on the back cover a lot:

Going green doesn't mean spending big bucks on organic food, solar panels, and hybrid cars. At its core, green living is simply about moderation, efficiency, and, believe it or not, living less expensively.

That is something we have been saying for years on TreeHugger and Planet Green, that spending less and consuming less is better for the environment. But Elizabeth Rogers (with help from Colleen Howell) goes further than we ever did; she puts real hard numbers to it. Every shift that you make in your lifestyle is quantified; here is an example pulled at random (well, actually because it was short and I have to type it out)

THE SHIFT: Use an electric teakettle, which is highly efficient at heating water, instead of a stovetop tea kettle, which results in lots of energy wasted as your burner heats the surrounding air in addition to your hot water.

Save $$ Up to $40 in energy costs per year for a household that heats water on the stovetop twice a day.

Save the Planet: Save 15 therms of natural gas or 455 kilowatt-hours of electricity, depending on your stove type.

Good for you: Electric kettles can heat water in less than half the time of stovetop ones, allowing you to enjoy your warm beverage a few minutes sooner each morning. They're also easier to clean, and most have automatic shutoffs.

Every item is pretty much like that: What you should do, how much you will save, how good it is for the environment and usually, another note.

Not only that, she backs it all up. You can go to the book's website and download a 41 page PDF with all of the data assumptions and hyperlinks to sources.

It is a useful book of small steps that all add up, and most will be familiar to regular Planet Green readers by now. It also shies away from moderate or big steps; where another writer might start off Transportation and Travel with "sell your car" or even "sell your second car", that is too radical a shift for this book. In food, it suggests going meatless one day per week; we pitch weekday vegetarianism. Perhaps some of the steps are too small.

But it gets most things right, and doesn't peddle green consumerism. I liked how it started an answer to the question "Are flat-screen TVs better or worse for the environment than the old big one?" with "The most eco-friendly television set is the one you already own."

Ultimately, there is a lot of good content backed up by real numbers here. Being a book of lists, there isn't much of a narrative arc; the author tries to humanize it with some families of "shifters" that I didn't find particularly compelling.

But those of us who have been trying for years to get people to "go green" could never really close the deal because, lets face it, climate change and the state of the Earth is a hard sell. In this book it is no accident that for each shift, Save $$ comes before Save the Planet. But if self-interest and saving money comes first, who cares; the result is the same.

More at Shift Your Habit, where they are trying to extend the brand with a forum and other features; I hope they add a big calculator app so that people can click on each shift they make and get a running total of what they are saving; it would be a real eye-opener.

From Three Rivers Press, US$ 14.00, Review copy courtesy of Random House Canada.

Read the whole Frugal Green Living series for more info on how going green can be frugal, too.